SAG Awards, Sundance more diverse

JAKE COYLE |
2/5/2016, 7:04 p.m.

From left: Laura Prepon, Uzo Aduba, Dascha Polanco and Selenis Leyva pose in the press room with the award for outstanding ensemble in a comedy series at the 22nd annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at the Shrine Auditorium & Expo Hall on Saturday, Los Angeles.

(AP) – Over just a few hours Saturday night, the SAG Awards and Sundance showered their honors on a parade of performers and films that presented a stark contrast to the crisis that has plagued the Oscars.

The two ceremonies, in Los Angeles and Park City, Utah, offered a night of reprieve from weeks of rancor over systemic inequality in the movie business and a second straight year of all-White Academy Award acting nominees.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to diverse TV,” said Elba in his third trip on stage as a presenter at the SAG Awards. His first two were to accept awards for his supporting performance in the Netflix child soldier drama Beasts of No Nation and for his lead performance in the BBC miniseries Luther.

Afterward, Parker took the festival’s grand jury prize and audience award at Sundance.

“Thank you, Sundance, for creating a platform for us to grow, in spite of what the rest of Hollywood is doing,” said Parker, whose directorial debut sold for a record sum to Fox Searchlight Pictures.

The SAG Awards top honor, best ensemble in a film, went to the newspaper drama Spotlight. The ensemble award had seemingly come down to Spotlight or Adam McKay’s high finance tale The Big Short, which last week took the Producers Guild’s top award. The win assures a competitive and unpredictable Oscars finale, with The Martian, The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road also in the mix.

“No way,” said Mark Ruffalo, one of the stars of Spotlight who praised writer-director Tom McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer for their purposeful accuracy in penning the journalistic procedural about the Boston Globe’s reporting on sexual abuse by Catholic priests. The two, he said, “took every single opportunity to tell the truth. They didn’t take any cheap way. It was always the truth.”

Elba made no direct reference to the uproar that has swept through Hollywood in the last two weeks, which might have been less severe had he been nominated by the Academy Awards, as many expected.

Accepting the most outstanding ensemble award in a comedy series for Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, co-star Laura Prepon gestured to the cast of the prison comedy standing behind her.

“Look at this stage,” Prepon said. “This is what we talk about when we talk about diversity.”

SAG winners for individual performances the last three years have corresponded with eventual Academy Award winners. Thus Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant), Brie Larson (Room) and Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl) all cemented their status as Oscar favorites. Each won, as expected.

But supporting actor will differ this year. The category’s perceived favorite is Sylvester Stallone for the Rocky sequel, Creed. Stallone, though, wasn’t nominated by the screen actors.

Actors make up the largest branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which is why the SAG Awards are a closely watched harbinger of the Oscars. But the Screen Actors Guild is massive by comparison: some 160,000 members to the academy’s 6,000-plus. Voting for the SAG Awards, which concluded Friday, also overlapped with the widespread debate over the industry’s inclusiveness that followed Academy nominations.